January 11, 2026
The First Word
Matthew 3:13-17 | Isaiah 43:1-7
You get a text message that says simply: “We need to talk.”
Four words. But what do they mean?
If it comes from your teenager: What happened now?
If it comes from your spouse: What did I forget?
If it comes from your boss: Am I getting fired or promoted?
Four words. The meaning depends entirely on who’s sending it, what’s happened before and what might come after.
This morning’s Gospel reading is like that. It’s a sentence, a single sentence spoken from heaven, and what it means depends on where it falls in the story: in the story of the gospel, in the story of Jesus, and in the story of our lives.
Listen now for the Word of God.
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.
And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
There’s an awkwardness to this scene that the early church never quite figured out. Jesus comes to John for baptism. John’s baptism was for repentance, for the forgiveness of sins. And here comes Jesus.
John resists. “I need to be baptized by you,” he says. It doesn’t make sense. Why would the sinless One need to repent? What does this mean about who Jesus is?
Yet Jesus insists. “Let it be so now…to fulfill all righteousness.” Matthew gives us the phrase, but not an explanation. The early church was genuinely embarrassed by this event. They struggled to explain it, tried to make sense of it. Jesus offers a phrase, not a full explanation. He just says it must be done. And then he wades into the water.
When he comes up out of the water it is so much more than an ordinary baptism of repentance.
The heavens are torn open. The Spirit descends like a dove. And a voice speaks from heaven.
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Before he has done or said anything – any miracles – any teaching – any healing – God speaks the First Word: Beloved.
The context of this word, where it falls in the story, matters tremendously. It comes after something and before something else. And where it is placed is a clue to what this word means for us.
John the Baptist has been out in the wilderness for weeks, maybe months, raising what we might call healthy anxiety. It’s the kind of anxiety that helps people face truth they have been avoiding.
He is confronting corrupt leaders. Calling out injustice. Demanding repentance. John is the man who by birth and lineage should be serving as a priest in the Temple, but he’s not there. Because the Temple and the system of government was broken and corrupt.
John is preaching to make people uncomfortable with their complicity in systems that grind down the poor and compromise the truth. He’s in the wilderness doing prophetic work—necessary, urgent, disruptive.
His message is meant to disturb self-confident leaders. “You brood of vipers!” he says to the Pharisees and Sadducees who come out to see him. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance!”
The moment into which Jesus comes for baptism is prophetic confrontation. A reckoning. The old systems are being called to account.
We also live in a time of prophetic confrontation, where there is necessary prophetic work to be done. Voices calling out neglect of the poor, abuse of the earth, violence done to the innocent, refusal to hear the cry of the needy.
Leaders without moral grounding who spin the truth to serve their own interests, who have no fear of God. I was reminded this week, listening to what our national leaders said, of one of the most damning lines of the Old Testament from the book of Judges: “There was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”
It often feels like we are living the frequent lament of the Psalmist against the wicked who have no fear of the living God. The contradictions to justice and peace are all around us, impossible to ignore if we are paying attention.
Some healthy anxiety is appropriate. When we witness injustice, we should feel disturbed. When systems abuse people they are meant to serve, we should feel unsettled. It’s not over-reacting, it’s moral awareness. God gave us a conscience. Prophetic disruption pricks the conscience, helps us to name clearly the distance between what is and what ought to be, calls us to bear fruit, and opens the door to repentance and change.
That is the setting into which Jesus comes for baptism. Prophetic confrontation. Necessary disruption.
But immediately after the baptism—every gospel says it was immediate—Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Forty days of testing. Temptation. Trial. Hunger. Isolation. The devil himself shows up with three tests, three tempting offers, three attempts to get Jesus to abandon his identity and his divine calling.
The affirmation of his belovedness does not exempt Jesus from the wilderness. It goes with him into it. This is crucial. The voice from heaven doesn’t say, “This is my beloved Son, so I’ll spare him from difficulty.” No, it is affirmation, then trial. Identity affirmed, then tested.
All of us know wilderness seasons. Aging that gradually steals our capacities. Loss that tears holes in our lives and changes us forever. Illness that reminds us how fragile these bodies are, how precious and fragile life is. Failure that exposes our limits and humbles our ambitions. Betrayal that shatters trust we thought was unshakeable.
And there is the low-grade anxiety that so many of us carry like a backpack we can’t set down. A dread that settles on us at three in the morning or three in the afternoon. Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Do I matter? The inner voice that whispers relentlessly: You’re failing. You’re falling short. You’re falling behind. Everyone else has it figured out but you.
Faith does not exempt us from these questions, and genuine theology does not give us easy answers. Jesus was beloved—the voice from heaven said so explicitly—and the Spirit drove him into the wilderness to face the devil.
So here we are. Caught between two forces. Between prophetic confrontation that creates necessary anxiety about the state of the world, and personal trials that threaten to overwhelm us with anxiety about ourselves. Between the call to stand up for justice and the fear that we don’t have the strength to make a difference.
What do we need? What could help us navigate between these two crushing realities?
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
This is what stands between. This word. This declaration. This divine speech-act that establishes identity before it calls for anything.
I’m calling it the First Word not just because it comes first chronologically, though it does. I’m calling it the First Word because it is first in priority. First in importance. First in what we need to hear. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.
This is a word of grace, not condemnation. A word about identity, not performance. A word that tells us who we are before it tells us what to do. A word that tells us to whom we belong.
The theologian Howard Thurman understood this deeply. Writing in 1949, he said: “The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.”
Thurman was not writing to a comfortable religious audience. He wrote these words in a book called Jesus and the Disinherited—a book for the oppressed. Those living under constant threat of violence. Those told by society every single day that they didn’t count, didn’t matter, weren’t fully human.
He knew that in the face of injustice and daily fear, what people needed wasn’t religious platitudes or pious advice. They needed to know whose they were. Children of God. Beloved. Claimed. Named.
He didn’t offer wishful thinking or a plan of action. He gave them an unshakeable identity no one could take away, no law could nullify, no violence could erase.
The prophet Isaiah says the same thing to the exiles in Babylon, people who have lost everything—their land, their temple, their king, their freedom: “I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned.”
Notice the language. Not if you pass through waters. When. This is a promise of presence through difficulty. Not that you won’t be tested, but that you won’t be alone. Not that the waters won’t rise, but that they won’t overwhelm you. Not that there won’t be fire, but that you won’t be consumed.
This is what the First Word does. This word stabilizes us. It creates a center that holds when everything else shakes. It generates courage—not false confidence, but the ability to face what’s actually in front of us. It produces courage—not the absence of fear, but freedom from fear’s control over our choices.
The staggering claim of the gospel is that this grounding grace is not just for Jesus. This word echoes over every one of us who has been baptized into Christ. This is God’s First Word to you.
To you who feel the call of prophetic confrontation, who know there must be a prophetic witness to God in a broken world: this word tells us to whom we belong. Not to political parties or cultural tribes. Not to the outrage of the moment or the fear of the future. Not to ideologies or social movements. Not to others, but not to ourselves only. We belong to God.
And so we are free. Free to work for justice without hatred. Free to resist evil without becoming the image of those we oppose. Free to stand firm without taking sides. Free to be angry about injustice without letting anger steal our joy. We are free because we belong to God.
When we face a personal wilderness, private trials, the anxieties that wake us at night: this word tells us we’re beloved even when we feel most unlovable.
This word arrives as a word of grace, from outside of ourselves; it is a word we cannot in fact speak to ourselves. The voice speaks into our wilderness: I have called you by name, you are mine. I delight in you. I am with you. You shall not be overwhelmed.
Not exemption from trial. Friendship through it. Not escape from the wilderness. Strength to endure it.
In a few minutes, we’re going to reaffirm the baptismal covenant. We’ll remember the water and the promises.
For those who have been baptized, whether as infants or adults, whether we remember it or not, this word has been spoken over us. It is your First Word.
If you have not been baptized, this moment is not a substitute, but it may be an invitation to make this word your own.
We do not earn this first word of grace. It is not spoken because we are good enough or faithful enough or anything enough. It is spoken because God claims us. God says: You are mine.
Baptism is a gift that keeps giving. A place to return to when you need to be reminded who you are. A place to receive courage when you are afraid, strength when you are weak. Let this be a sign to you of the First Word.
Between the anxiety about a world we cannot save and the anxiety about ourselves we cannot silence—between prophetic confrontations we must face and the personal trials we must endure—stands this word.
Hear it again. Listen for it. Receive it. Let it be for you.
[pause]
You are beloved. I will be with you. You are mine. You belong to God.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina